Wednesday, October 13, 2010

"Out on the terrace we could see them coming across the fields from a chapel with a blue dome. I recognized a figure in shorts and T-shirt with a sailor's cap on the back of his head. It was Tom Condor, christened Athanasios Kondarini in the Greek church in Brooklyn Heights, recently employed in an airlines office in Akron, Ohio, whom I had met at boat-drill two hours out of New York harbour. His sisters, on leave from a New York department store, their bobbed hair and pretty painted faces visible among so many heads swathed in kerchiefs, took long strides in their plaid trousers through the other slowly-moving women.

'Poor Anna and Zoe', said Phrangisko at my side. 'It seems already half the island has asked to marry them. The other half considers them–you will excuse the words–tsoules, because they paint themselves and go about in trousers. They don't deserve it, but people here are narrow in the head'" (11–12).